Roman born in 1948, in 2021 George Parisi he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his studies on complex systems. Today, to make his theories more accessible to all, a video-cartoon. The physicist was behind the initiative George Sestile, head of the science communication network giorgiosestili.it, and Julius Pompeii di DoYouSpeakScience?.
Giorgio Parisi's theory in a comic
Sestili and Pompei translated Giorgio Parisi's theory into a cartoon with the scientific supervision of the theoretical physicist Enzo Marinari, professor at the Sapienza University of Rome and close collaborator of Parisi. What does their video-comic tell? The physicist awarded with the Nobel, in the round, tells the story. Starting from the 70s when, immediately after graduation, he became passionate about the behavior of the so-called "spin glasses"(Disordered magnetic alloys). In their apparent chaos, the physicist managed to locate one hidden structure. He understood that in such systems many fundamental properties of Statistical Mechanics, the current physical approach, are not valid. And thus he opened the way for very many complex phenomena only apparently governed from chaos: atoms, biological systems, the study of cells but also of the brain, up to the flight of flocks and the periodicities of the ice ages.
Featured photo taken from YouTube (credits Communicating science, health and the environment)
